Horizon Hosted Applications: What a Year it has Been!

It’s been a year since we added support for Hosted Applications to Horizon and what a year it has been! The industry excitement has been invigorating. We have had tremendous interest from organizations of all shapes and sizes; and the excitement keeps growing with each new release.

Just a few of the features we have added over the last year include:

Client Drive Redirection and File Associations
Users can now share folders and drives on their local client systems with hosted applications and desktops. Hosted Applications also now supports file associations. File associations automatically connect the client to the correct hosted application when a user opens or double-clicks an associated file type. Both of these features help provide a great user experience, making it easy for users to quickly access the files and data they need.

HTML Access Support for Hosted Apps
Hosted Apps now supports HTML Access. Users can now connect to Hosted Apps and Desktops from clients that simply have HTML 5 support, including most modern web browsers. This new capability has also been extended to multi-site Cloud Pod Architecture deployments, enabling organizations to implement the largest Hosted App infrastructures.

3D Graphics SupportThe 3D vDGA and GRID vGPU graphics solutions for Horizon VDI desktops have been extended to Hosted Apps. Now you simply need to deploy the app instead of entire desktop to support graphics-intensive applications.

Windows Media Multimedia Redirection (MMR) for RDS Desktops
Windows Media MMR is now supported for videos playing on RDS desktops. MMR offloads video processing from the hosted desktop to the user’s client device to support high quality video without sapping expensive server resources.

And you can watch this video to see a demonstration of the great user experience provided by VMware Hosted Applications:

Over the last year, our developers have been busy adding great new features for Administrators and Architects too. Features such as:

View Composer for RDSH ServersRDSH Servers used to support Hosted Apps and Desktops can now be efficiently deployed and managed using View Composer with VMware Linked Clone technology. This makes it easy for Admins to deploy and update their RDSH Servers whether they support a few dozen or thousands.

Enhanced User Load BalancingUser connections to Hosted Applications and Desktops are now brokered to the best RDSH Server to handle them based on server memory and CPU load. This helps ensure a great user experience while efficiently scaling utilization across the entire server farm.

Now while it is certainly true our competitor has had some of these features for quite some time, we know many of you running their products have had them for much longer than you would like. So we are thrilled to be able to provide you an alternative. One that won’t be standing still as our developers work feverishly to add more features and devise new ways to make the user and administrative experience even better.

And if you combine Horizon Hosted Applications with VMware App Volumes for real-time application delivery, User Environment Manager for dynamic user experience management, and ThinApp, the leading application virtualization solution, you have a complete next generation application delivery platform. So take VMware Horizon for a Test Drive, by trying it out online using our Hands on Labs or downloading a full evaluation from https://www.vmware.com/test-drive. And stay tuned! Because if you think this last year was exciting, just wait until you see what the next one brings.

For more information about VMware Horizon and the other products you can use to build a next generation application delivery system, check out these great blogs and product pages: